"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
commenting on the New York fucking Times rehashing lies about the most demonstrably competent President we have had since LBJ being an addled, senile old man, while it covers up and enables the addled, senile old man who is also an idiot to start with and a criminal who the New York fucking Times did so much to put there, starting well before 2016 when they sandbagged probably the most qualified candidate to have ever gotten a major party nomination to put him there.
Along with those myths about the Supreme Court, the Constitution and other dearly cherished myths of American life, the myth of the "free press" being a bulwark of American democracy is a pile of shit with a few quarters thrown into it. You have to mine loads of shit to find those things that have really been valuable, only shit will eventually turn to compost which has a good purpose, most of journalism has no purpose except to bury democracy on behalf of oligarchs such as who own outfits like the big papers like the WaPo and the NYfT. I wish someone would do an in-depth investigation of the financial and personal motives of the owners of the NYfT to expose their motives in doing so much to sink democracy while posing as the defenders of democracy. I know why they strike the pose, to gull the affluent idiot-moderates and liberals who can afford the goddamned thing. What I want exposed is the real motives behind why they an their brothel of media whores do what they do. It's far more transparent in the case of the owner of the WaPo and the LA Times but the Ochs-Sulzbergers and those who cling on them is not as obvious or transparent. I always had the feeling that the previous publisher - I forget, was it "pinch" or "punch" or maybe "putsch" - had felt some social slight by Bill Clinton that caused the Times three decades and counting war against him and Hillary Clinton, much as I always figured Christopher Hitchens resented Bill Clinton from Arkansas being more successful with girls at Oxford than tubby, oily little Hitch was.
But I think to really continue as they have, sandbagging Joe Biden, there has to be money at the bottom of it. Could it be as simple as they wanted the Trump millionaire-billionaire tax bonanza to continue? I wouldn't be surprised if it were that simple.
I'm going to remember everyone, from the alleged left to the moderates to the right who had a hand in handing the country over to Trump and Republican fascists, from the owners of the media brothels to the hired talent right on down to the alleged comedians who made "Old Joe Biden" jokes. The consequences for us and the world of what they did is as serious as those who aided the rise of Hitler and other of the kind of worst criminals who the modern era has given rise to. I've told before how, when Ronald Reagan died I gave scandal to many a lefty blogger by telling the terrible truth about him and the many thousands he killed only to have them give me the "speak only good of the dead." My answer was that the forgiveness they needed wasn't mine to give, that I'd consider it after those tens and hundreds of thousands or more before me in line uniformly gave him theirs. I will never overlook what they've done to us. The consequences for other People and living beings is too great for that. May they spend a long, long period in hell for what they've done.
WHILE I'M CERTAIN that there are things Rabbi Shapiro and I would disagree about, a few, and I'll note that again A FEW aspects of sexual morality, gender roles and, of course, that I'm a Christian and he's an Orthodox Jew, his honesty and clarity of thought as well as his clearly diligent scholarship and reasoning impresses me ever more every time I listen to one of his talks. Unfortunately his book, "The Empty Wagon: Zionism's Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft" is outside of my budget and longer than I'd feel capable of taking on right now.
In looking more deeply into the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism, the clearly dishonest though largely successful lie campaign to equate the two to the extent that, as Rabbi Shapiro points out, someone taken as being as credible as Deborah Lipstadt is taken to be, can call Jews "antisemites" because they oppose zionism and are critical of the state of Israel. Lipstadt tap danced around an answer to that direct question in a weasely way by claiming that "the jury was out" on that issue, so as to say that not only Jews but the most observant of Jews, the most dedicated to Judaism can be anti-Jewish which should impeach her as an honest voice in the discussion but, as he also shows, she's far from alone in being so dishonest.
If zionism were an honest ideology, its defense wouldn't force scholars who certainly know when they are lying to lie through their teeth, in public, on the record. If academic credentials carried an obligation to tell the truth there would be some mechanism for removing university credentials from those holding those credentials who use their alleged authority to lie so flagrantly and maliciously though, from the start, academia was never much a moral proposition outside of some seminaries attached to specific denominations - and a lot of them were no more honest about guaranteeing the validity of the credentials they issue. They didn't remove the academic credentials but they, sometimes, removed other credentials from them. I have to say that academic credentialing is something that has plummeted in my regard since the turn of the century and I went online to read more of the babble of such college grad.
I can't claim that Rabbi Shaprio's answers to the many aspects of the question brought to him by the interviewer are neat and succinct in the desired modern American mode - which is unfortunate because Americans aren't, by and large, deep thinkers with great powers of concentration or even a long attention span, and I am directly talking to a couple of the jerks who troll me when I say that.
But his answer is the best one I've yet heard so I'm posting it. The definition of "antisemitism" he comes up with as opposed to the phony, polemical one that the IHRA has pushed so as to protect the criminals of the Israeli government and military as they commit genocide and crimes against humanity is vastly superior to that one which has been made de facto law of the land and the lying corporate media. As he points out, it was the genuine definition of the word, one that not only appeared in dictionaries of the English language BUT WAS SET OUT IN AT LEAST ONE HANDBOOK OF CAMPUS PRO-ISRAELI PROPAGANDA BEFORE THE NEW ONE WAS ADOPTED. He also says something that I've pointed out here a number of times, states don't have rights, human beings have rights, no state has a "right to exist." I feel especially vindicated in what I said because he is such a deep and honest and rational thinker and I don't get much occasion for having my ideas vindicated so authoritatively.
I would recommend listening at least once, I intend to listen a number of times and may go to the effort of editing the entire machine made transcript for posting in the future.
about the point in yesterday's post about the Roberts Court creating an extra-Constitutional means of law making in the United States, the more convinced I am that I am right about that. The Roberts Court isn't the first court to amend the Constitution by Supreme Court majority fiat, they've been doing that with increasing frequency and increasing recklessness since 1803, but it is the first one to have gone so far as to basically and drastically alter the very form of governance that is the entire basis of the United States Constitution WHICH BEGINS BY MAKING THE CONGRESS THE ONLY BODY ABLE TO ACTUALLY MAKE LAW. The Supreme Court, starting with the modest nullification of a provision in the Judiciary Act - actually drafted by and voted on in Congress by actual framers of the very Constitution - and next and far more catastrophically in the Dred Scott decision, even those entirely outrageous oversteps by the most compromised and corrupt Court in the land hadn't gone so far as to, in effect, nullify the First Article in the Constitution.
And that is exactly what the Roberts Court did starting just over a year ago by making their future Republican-fascist king, Trump, immune from the law and which they have been reinforcing with increased intensity - especially for the lazy, Ivy Leaguer slackers on this court - and devotion to destroying the United States as a government of laws and not of one Republican-fascist man. They have nullified laws and even sections of the Constitution to put what is indisputably the most corrupt, most criminal, stupid and the most dishonest liar and . . . to remind you CONVICTED CRIMINAL to have ever held the Presidency in the position above laws duly enacted by Congress and previous presidents - allegedly the only legitimate means of making law in the United States. And, as I pointed out, combined with the foolish absolute pardon power that is actually in the Constitution, they have made it certain that Trump and whatever future presidents who are of his criminal nature will be able to enact their laws made by monarchical fiat through pardoning their henchmen and storm trooper armies to enforce their will with violence and even death.
So the Supreme Court which was supposed to interpret the law, has, in fact, nullified not only laws, some of the most important ones ever made such as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, but have by 5-4 and 6-3 PARTISAN MAJORITIES on the Supreme Court nullified the very form of government which the Constitution set up.
I pointed to the Dred Scott decision in which the infamous Taney Court - before now generally held to be the worst Court to have ever sat in . . . "judgement" which nullified the citizenship of Black People and nullified all of their rights under the Constitution. They did that along with nullifying a long-standing law made by Congress, the Missouri Compromise, to do that. Proving that not only could the Supreme Court make real human beings non-persons, it could create not only "persons" but grant them de facto citizenship in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case in which the Court created corporations as "persons" using a forged and plainly dishonest claim by a Senator who then became a corporate lawyer, lying that into the 14th Amendment where it has gone on to let later courts turn their artificial "persons" into Übermenschen with even the rights baked into the First Amendment but with more power than thousands and millions of real human citizens. The 1976 Buckely vs Valeo, made on behalf of one of the premier fascist elite family which also transmuted money into "speech" thus giving billionaires, millionaires and corporations millions and billions more "speech" than any citizen or even their measly non-profit corporations could ever wield. And all the time, as they expanded farther and father on that, creating junk that was never in the Constitution nor ever adopted as law by the due processes of Constitutional government, they have been stripping actual human beings of their rights - the Roberts Court has gone farther in that than any previous court or, I'd argue, ALL PREVIOUS COURTS TOGETHER HAVE. The Taney Court settled on stripping Black People of their rights and person hood and even citizenship, the Roberts Court has done that to whoever Trump and their own Republican-fascist Party targets for that dehumanization. White People, even white men, for the first time in our history could stand a chance of finding out what life in these United States has been for People of Color, Women and others targeted by the law and the Court as lesser beings in ways that previous generations never had to face Of course workers have been treated that way for almost the entire career of the Supreme Court, especially under their invention of "corporate person hood" through their from the bench amendments to and nullifications of clauses in the 14th and other Amendments.
I have a nightmare that the United States, by a miracle, at this point, pulls out of this and a Democratic super majority under a Democratic president takes power and is in a position to stop this Court led plummet into the fascism we are actually in the beginning stages of. My fear is that the Constitutional scholars and civil liberties lawyers and milquetoast moderates will be too goddamned chicken to make the changes needed - starting with stripping the Court of the very Marbury power that they stole to start with, putting sufficently short term limits on the tenure of the members of the Court (they should be stripped of the lying title "Justices" too) and making it far easier to remove them than the impossibility of doing that now. And those are only some of the necessary limits on the Supreme Court. They also need to make it clear by Constitutional Amendment that no person in the United States - INCLUDING MOST OF ALL A SITTING PRESIDENT WITH SO MUCH POWER - is immune from prosecution for crimes committed while AND AS PRESIDENT. They should also remove the idiotic absolute pardon power when it comes to those in and out of their administration whose actions impinged on their election and holding the office of president, Vice Presidents who take power on the resignation of a President should explicitly NOT be able to pardon the president who is in a perfect position to make a Nixon-Ford corrupt deal to that effect. And it must also make it clear that no Supreme Court has the power to nullify or amend the Constitution. Without those, I wouldn't bet a dime on American democracy in even its imperfect and unequal form surviving. Once those Ivy Leaguer lair-lawyers have made innovations and published them, that is a trail for them to always follow ever after until those trails are destroyed, utterly.
I've grown used to people who read what I post thinking I've gone too far, twenty years ago I used to have idiots on blog comment threads scold me for saying the Republican Party was a fascist party - Bush v Gore was the tipping point in that for me. I've been scolded for condemning the Supreme Court by those who got the vapors and accused me of being like the segregationists who put up bill boards calling for Earl Warren's impeachment. I had more than one mid-brow, college-credentialed, media addled dolt saying "The first person to say "fascist" (or "Nazi") loses." I always hear Susan Stamberg's smarmy NPR voice saying that when I hear it in my mind no matter who typed it into the comment thread. But I'm getting used to even some of those who mocked that saying the same thing, sometimes years later. Generally, in the past I hoped they were right and I was wrong. But I don't bother hoping that anymore because I'm certain I'm right. And I don't feel any happiness in being right about these things.
THE BRILLIANT British commentator Owen Jones has been vilified online by J. K. Rowling and I have to say his answer asking her, the epic anti-trans avenger of feminism (though I'd like to know how she treats feminists who have no problem with TransPeople) has been entirely silent over the murders, rapes, sexual abuse, torture, and the health, nutritional, family and personal catastrophe that has been ongoing for going on two years against Palestinian WOMEN, only, as he shows in his video defense of himself and turning the question on her. Or maybe it's only Women in the West she cares about or Women who want to do things like compete in sports or play roles in movies. She clearly hasn't been bothered to say anything about the hundreds of thousands who have been the victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza and elsewhere.
But she wasn't exactly silent, having early on condemned those who were calling for a cease fire. I was pretty much done with Harry Potter well before this but I'd never have taken it up if I knew how things were going to go. You might want to listen to how he takes her apart.
I'm going to post the video again from later in it where he exposes the libel against himself committed by the Israel right-or-wrong and even in Nazi mode crowd, including the war criminal Netanyahu's former press flack. He shows how a dishonestly clipped question he asked of the odious Piers Morgan was presented as him excusing the acts of Hamas on October 7th, when he was pointing out that what Morgan was saying about Israels' ongoing genocide WOULD BE EXACTLY LIKE EXCUSING THAT CRIME DUE TO ISRAEL'S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS. The Liars for Israel clipped it to make it seem like he was excusing the crimes of October 7th and it's gone viral with the apologists for genocide and mass slaughter.
Only, the fact is that it is the Israel apologists who are doing exactly what they are accusing Owen Jones of doing WHEN HE DIDN'T DO THAT.
Back to Rowling.
Maybe what happens to Rowling happens to most if not all of those who become billionaires and believe they got it by being a lot smarter or better than they are. In her case probably exacerbated by her knowing that without her imagining the books, none of that would have happened. She didn't hire the writing job out like most billionaires have gotten rich off of other Peoples' ideas. If that's the case she should have gotten over that by now. She wrote a series of kid's books that became wildly popular, it isn't as big as all that. Seeing what she's up to these days, I don't think I'd read her books to children again, I don't think I'd defend her against her dishonest right-wing fundamentalist critics, as I used to. If she were as good and smart as she seems to like to believe she is, she'd listen to as honest and exigent a critic as Jones is and do a little of that self-reflection that I believe is also recommended in even her Presbyterian tradition.
something occurred to me that I haven't heard anyone address. Their un-constitutional declaration last year that presidents are immune from prosecution when they break the law as an "official act" of the presidency mixed with the idiotic provision that is actually and dangerously IN THE CONSTITUTION means that the president, on his own, can effectively make laws that, if future presidents chose to take them up and continue or even expand them, they could put into effect in perpetuity without the Congress doing it, that continuing as long as the heretofore and likely never will happen removal of a president by impeachment doesn't stop it. And no one he orders to implement said law would be prosecuted if he gave them a pardon for it, even the courts would be disempowered by the Roberts Courts actions to stop that law ever being the real law of the land, in concrete fact instead of Ivy League lawery-liarly non-reality.
If you have any faith in the Supreme Court, especially this corrupt Roberts Court overturning a president pardoning himself or corruptly making a deal with the VP to pardon him on his stepping down from office - as I have always believed Gerald Ford made with Richard Nixon - you are as stupid as an old line "civil liberties" liberal.
Since the Roberts Court has said that Trump could violate the law and even deport People without any judicial review preventing that from happening - even to third countries where the People being deported, to their almost certain torture and likely risk of death with the blessings of Roberts, Alito, Thomas (the RAT in this court) Goresuch, Kavanaugh and the fradulent "moderate" Amy Coney Barrett clearly they are all in on that actual, concrete, presidential law making stuff, 100%.
I will be writing a post on the uses of negative stereotypes, the condemnation of those as an abstract proposition running up against the reality of those members of groups who actually do the things that the stereotype contain, seemingly giving some TRUTH TO IT and why objecting to calling that out is a massive and currently very dangerous practice of alleged "civil libertarians" and others such as who pose as that while promoting some of the greatest evils of our day - but as you can see from that description of the very real phenomenon, laying it out is rather complex and getting out of that complexity towards clarity is not the easiest thing to write. But I do have to ask, as an Irish Catholic of the kind who takes both the The Gospel, foremost, and the Law and the Prophets and the best of the Christian tradition extremely seriously, what kind of Catholicism formed the six fascists who are sitting on that Court right now. ALL OF THEM had an alleged Catholic formation, if my memory of their bios is correct, ALL OF THEM ARE DESTROYING EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO SET UP THE MOST IMMORAL, AMORAL, CROOKED AND STUPID PRESIDENT OF OUR LIFETIME TO BE SUCH A DICTATOR AS I DESCRIBE ABOVE AND TO KEEP THEIR CROOKED FASCIST PARTY IN POWER FOR PERPETUITY AGAINST THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
I have no problem with someone asking that question, a question which, I will point out, anti-Catholic bigots have pointed out in the past - leaving out such as "justice" Sotomayor who are more in line with the Catholic tradition than those six whited sepulchers in black robes. THAT question will come into play in that post I'm undertaking but want to say just right.
I FIRST LEARNED of the wonderful writer and actor Wallace Shawn from watching My Dinner With Andre. At first I thought I was going to hate the movie because of Andre Gregory's long stream of bullshit semiconsiousness of a kind I'd gotten my fill of during my college years - for its devaluation of mysticism into that kind of bullshit, too.
But then "Wally" took over and I liked the movie a lot more after that. I have, from time to time, looked at what Wallace Shawn has been up to, some of his plays have been the kind that I think are the most important, disturbing, troubling, questioning, forcing uncomfortable situations to conscious consideration. Aunt Dan and Lemon, for example.
Here he presents why he calls himself a socialist, it is one of the best short essays I've heard or read in a long while. I don't call myself a "socialist" for the same reason I rejected the word "Christian" for myself, though I certainly believe in the Gospel of Jesus and most of what is said in the rest of the New Testament and by a good part of the Christian tradition that takes those seriously. I think the word, itself has lost its meaning and any positive usefulness through its appropriation by some of the most vile of political ideologies, Fabianism, Marxism, various right-wing "socialisms" and, of course, the contradictory claim of a form of it as "National Socialism" (which makes almost as little sense as "Christian nationalism"). The term "antisemitism" (which I have heard applied to Mr Shawn) has lost its meaning through a similar appropriation by those with evil ideological intent and it is not only meaningless but has been weaponized by fascists around the world, many of them actual antisemites.
But here is a voice of reason for the last day of the long American weekend
MERCEDES SOSA WASN'T an atheist as you claim, I have no idea if Silvio Rodriguez is or not, he is a fine poet and not a bad song writer. And I did post that song of his because his covert message was fitting for July 4th in the United States.
Dos días antes de morir, Mercedes Sosa recibió la unción de los enfermos (sacramento también llamado extremaunción) de manos de un sacerdote amigo, el padre Luis Farinello.
La muy querida intérprete, de profunda voz y raigambre popular, en buena parte de su vida circuló en ambientes artísticos y políticos muy ligados al Partido Comunista y a sectores de izquierda afines.
Quizá sean poco conocidas algunas manifestaciones suyas que revelaron un proceso de acercamiento a la fe católica de sus mayores, y una reconsideración de algunos enfoques, como el trato que se dio a la gente de fe ortodoxa en Rusia.
En una conferencia de prensa, en julio de 1999, en San José de Costa Rica, donde estaba en una gira centroamericana, Mercedes Sosa declaró haber encontrado a Dios, luego de atravesar un agudo proceso de depresión. "Estuve perdida y encontré a Dios", reconoció en esa ciudad.
Confesó estar saliendo de "un agudo proceso depresivo", que había comenzado varios meses antes y que en algún momento le impidió cantar pues "lo único que quería era dormir".
Entonces, declaró ante la prensa costarricense que los rezos de su familia y de muchas otras personas contribuyeron a su recuperación.
"Tengo tíos curas y tías monjas que rezaron por mí cuando estuve enferma. Vengo de una familia muy católica", dijo. A la vez, reconoció entonces que su proceso de encuentro todavía se encontraba "a medio camino".
En una ocasión, la intérprete cantó ante el papa Juan Pablo II en el Segundo Concierto de Navidad en el Vaticano.
El padre Farinello atendió a la madre de Mercedes, de fe católica arraigada en su familia tucumana, hasta su muerte. Allí, la artista empezó a mostrar fuertes inquietudes espirituales. Y le dijo al padre: "Cuando llegue el día en que esté así, no se olvide de mí".
A juicio del sacerdote, ella "fue madurando y abriéndose al misterio".
Mercedes cantó gratuitamente para la fundación del padre Farinello y sus chicos. Y le decía que "el hambre de los pibes es obsceno". Hace unos dos años le había pedido al sacerdote una imagen de la Virgen de Luján. "Siempre que hablábamos, conversábamos mucho sobre Dios y la Virgen de Luján", comentó él.
Cuando el sacerdote la visitó, la artista estaba inconsciente. El le dio la unción y sintió un estremecimiento. Le habló al oído. A su entender, "ella se conmovió". Y entiende que ante la muerte se ve eso: "Es entregarse a una ternura invisible, que uno presiente".
The well known radical Argentinian Fr. Luis Farinello certainly knew her, he clearly was satisfied with her standing as a Catholic, enough so he administered the Sacraments to her. If she had a devotion to the Virgin of Lujan, I don't know how much more Catholic you get than that.
Day of Days is a six-part podcast series from Walking Cinema that recounts a meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black mystic Howard Thurman, as King was recovering from a stabbing in Harlem in 1958. That meeting brought King face-to-face with the demons pursuing him since the Montgomery bus boycotts, and revolutionized his approach to the fledgling Civil Rights Movement.
Jonathan Mitchell directed, sound designed, and composed the original music for the series, which was created by Michael Epstein of Walking Cinema, and written by Darren Canady.
You can learn more about the series, and it's free companion Augmented Reality app at http://dayofdayspodcast.com
I've been looking for excellent dramas to post here but haven't had much time this year, what with the world going to hell. I don't often like dramas that use real People and real events but this one does so very well and for a higher purpose than costume dramas generally do. You can decide if posting it was the right decision or not. The writing is excellent as is the acting and the production.
I've posted it from Youtube where you an hear the whole series because, unfortunately, the player at the website for the production doesn't like the version of Linux I'm using these days. You might have better luck with that one.
I found this through the excellent audio-drama production outfit at The Truth who seem to have reactivated after a long period of behind the scenes action, if that's the case then it's great news in itself.
BUT HERE is my response from the Consumer Product Safety Commission:
As July 4th celebrations near, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is urging the public to prioritize fireworks safety. Mishandling fireworks can turn celebration into tragedy.
In 2024, there were 11 reported fireworks-related deaths, most involving misuse and device misfire/malfunctions. An estimated 14,700 people were injured by fireworks last year – a sharp increase of about 38% in deaths and about 52% in injuries respectively compared to 2023. There were an estimated 1,700 emergency room treated injuries in 2024 involving sparklers.
Adults ages 25 to 44 accounted for the largest share of reported injuries (32%), followed by people ages 15 to 24 (24%). The most frequently injured body parts were hands and fingers (36%) and head, face, and ears (22%). Burns were the most common injury, making up 37% of all emergency room visits.
In 2025, you can add those who died and were injured when that fireworks warehouse facility in Esparto California blew up the other day the fire spreading to surrounding areas, not to count those in other countries, such as China, where the things are made. Of course, if you care nothing about workers' lives, others killed in such disasters, the lives of children injured when their parents or others are irresponsible*, like any low-brow pop-kulcha guy who has never had kids might be expected to, then none of this will bother you as you groove out to what is an even stupider form of entertainment than American football or Broadway musicals in todays' slacker-low-brow style are.
My brother calls setting off fireworks "burning money." I say you've seen one fireworks display you've seen them all. If there's a stupider form of entertainment, I'd like to know what it is. Given the death toll, the maiming, the environmental damage from them, it's something that should be banned by law.
* That guy who died while he set off a firework from his head while drunk was among those who died in the U.S last year. I wonder if he'd seen something like that on TV or in a movie or online.
I GREW UP WITH THE CLICHE IN MY EAR that "you can't judge those of the past by preset day standards" though I think I always thought it was nonsense. It was invariably said to hold some figure or group up as heroic or authoritative or worthy of imitation while knowing that they were not worthy of imitation. Of course, Thomas Jefferson is the case example of this I'm going to cite today but I've also held up Madison and others of the fabled (that means having their many sins covered up) founders and framers. And it was never equally applied to all of those in the past but only to those who were put to such use. But I think it's time we look at a corollary that should have been in place all along if that rotely repeated and stupid rule of thumb is to stand.
If you aren't to make moral assessment of the real lives of such as the founders and framers by present day standards, WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE THEIR WORDS AS A STANDARD TO JUDGE PRESENT DAY ACTIONS AND STANDARDS? Last week I pointed out that unless you're going to learn from the past to gather information so as to determine present day actions and improve on those standards of the past, everything about looking at history turns it into a devalued and sentimental (that means false when it doesn't mean lying about it) exercise in the cheapest of nostalgic antiquarianism. Much of the worst of that made more saleable by the morally bankrupt standards of crappy novels and Hollywood movies and Broadway song and dance crap methods. Any emotional response, such as holding human beings and their actions in what gets passed off as conventionally felt "reverence" which isn't based in a rigorous evaluation of them can quickly turn dangerously dishonest. (See Also Leon Uris's "Exodus" and especially the crap movie they made of it. )
IN THE UNITED STATES, THAT IS MOST EVIDENT IN THE USES OF SUCH AS THE REHNQUIST AND ROBERTS COURT, THEIR PHONY "ORIGINALISM" AND "TEXTUALISM" AND WHAT OTHER LYING LABELS THEY'RE TACKING ON TO THEM DOING EXACTLY THAT AND FORCING THEIR LIES ABOUT HISTORY ON US, TODAY. Alito and Coney Barrett have done that about some of their citation of ancient British law some of which has been superseded in Britian by British Courts on the basis of that ancient legal lore not standing the test of time to answer present day conditions. If you think that's inconsequential, look at what's happening to Women with dangerous miscarriages and likely fatal pregnancies in most of the country and, quite potentially as soon as they can do it, extending their nationalization of Womens' bodies such as is done in the abortion ban states to the entire country, as, in fact, was one of the things that the Taney Court did in expanding slavery to all of the "free states" in the Dred Scott decision. I've pointed out here that their ancient ancestor, the Supreme Court "justice" who was allegedly the anti-slavery voice on the Marshall Court, Joseph Storey did much the same thing in citing ancient English law in his Supreme Court practice, law that had been, likewise, superseded in British Law even before he cited it to try to control the law in the United States. Knowing that, it's a lot less surprising that he wrote the Prigg decision, which, before Dred Scott, was the most infamous pro-slavery ruling that corrupt Court had issued. I can't think that Storey's pride in his knowledge of the history of ancient English and British law was not a major factor in why he could use the U.S. Constitution to such corrupt ends and still pride himself as being what he clearly was not. May he rot in a particularly hot region of hell with John Marshall, Roger Taney, Rehnquist and Scalia, among others. Alito and Coney Barrett, as well.
It's absurd that late medieval English or ancient British Law would have that much power over a country that was founded in those very founders rejecting the most enduring of medieval English and ancient British Law, rejecting not only the monarch which has been retained in Britain, but also the authority of the very institutions and long dead People who adopted and retained that even more authoritative British legal framing only to have our Supreme Court - especially when they want to make law from the bench that is especially a violation of rights of living People - CITE WHAT THEY HAVE REJECTED AS UNWORKABLE to make judicially legislated laws here and now. That under the framing of the Constitution, We The People and our ELECTED representatives roll over and give up when they do that is a moral abomination.
But such absurdity is, in fact, what governs us under our disastrously failed Constitution. IF YOU THINK I'VE BEEN ALL WET OVER THAT FACT, THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED CATASTROPHICALLY, WELL, EVEN JUDGE LUTTIGE AND EMINENT LAWYERS ARE ADMITTING THAT, NOW.
This post was motivated by me reading Michael Sean Winter's very uneven piece about the Declaration of Independence posted on the 3rd. Particularly this passage.
Last weekend, I rewatched Ken Burns' 1997 documentary on "Thomas Jefferson." It celebrated his achievements while also addressing his failings. It captured the degree to which Jefferson remains an enigma. How could the man whose words and life celebrated the possibilities of human freedom, and its God-given quality, fail to disassociate himself from the greatest affront to that freedom, slavery? All these years later, there is no good answer to that question.
When the leaders of the civil rights movement spoke, they spoke first and foremost in the words of Sacred Scripture but secondly in the words Jefferson himself had penned in the Declaration of Independence. And let us always demonstrate sufficient humility to admit that if we had been born on a Virginia plantation when Jefferson had been born on such a plantation, and if we think we would have seen how to end slavery as he did not, we think very highly of ourselves.
The problem is that once the young Jefferson penned those famous - and largely correct words - at the start of the Declaration of Independence about "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," Jefferson not only never did much of anything to end the most obvious violation of that rampant among those in the Continental Congress who edited and adopted the Declaration of Independence and their suppos-ed "new order for the ages," holding Black People in slavery, he became increasingly enthusiastic about not only slave-holders holding People as property but, also, in breeding People into slavery as a means of HIM AND HIS FRIENDS increasing their wealth. He was so enthusiastic about that that he raped one of those he held in slavery and fathered children with her WHO HE HELD IN SLAVERY. There's no one who would not only never do that but who would condemn it in any age who doesn't have a right to think that they have higher moral standards than Jefferson did. I'd say they have an obligation to hold that their standards AND PRACTICE are superior to his because the lives of those potentially impacted for the worst by such as hold Jefferson up as a model of law making - whether with some claim to legitimacy in the legislature or with blatant illegitimacy from the Court or, now, with the Court's permission, as illegitimately by Presidential decree.
I would say that it's especially valuable to do that in the case of Jefferson - it's only during my lifetime that the issued words of the Declaration in question, words that have been hollowly echoed in total dishonesty for the majority of our history have been applied to the the "all men" who are People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. instead of only those white men who owned property who the founders and framers intended those to be applied to. The present day Republican-fascist reaction to that progress towards equatlity is destroying the progress we finally started making in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts which the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are overturning - along with even the Civil War Amendments - using their asserted fictions about the intentions of Jefferson's generation and lies about the legislative record of the 14th Amendment to do that. Looking at all of this in terms of what is moral and morally consistent and noting the failures of the men who wrote such words AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT FAILURE IN THE LIVES OF THOSE MOST HARMED BY THAT FAILURE is the only good use of the past that can be had from them. If the Roberts Court Republican-fascist majority could get what they want to out of the words by telling the truth, they wouldn't have to lie so incoherently and they wouldn't have to go looking to judges who burned Women at the stake for witchcraft to find their excuses.
If you look at the Black Abolitionist literature, you will note that the hypocrisy of Jefferson, whose words are sometimes so true and whose life was a fabric of lies and hypocrisy, was a truth self-evident to those who had been held in slavery by the very class of white men he advocated breed their slaves for profit, I must point out, in his case, certainly, also for his fun. It was so self-evident that even the white abolitionists picked up on it. You certainly don't have to be a very good person, yourself, or even to consider yourself as one to know you've done better than that. What's the point of examining your conscience, as I'm sure a good Catholic boy such as Winters would advocate doing, if you were to never conclude that there are practices that are better than others?
It is a good thing for People to not be too impressed with their own moral conduct, as an Irish Catholic of what would be called the "liberal" kind, constant self-questioning of my own motives and actions is practically congenital, it even works, on occasion. But to dishonestly deny that anyone who would never do that and would be opposed to it is more moral than a Thomas Jefferson, not to mention a Madison or Washington, is being dishonest to no good purpose and, not infrequently, a really evil purpose. There were Quakers and others in Jefferson's day who gave up holding slaves and liberated them due to their finally choosing the morality of Jesus - the Golden Rule most often cited. Going back almost 1,500 years before that, St. Macrina, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and others opposed slavery, Gregory's argument's against it were particularly good. His sister and teacher Macrina convinced her widowed mother to practice equality in their household, treating those held in slavery on an equal basis with those of their own family. If I've got to have long dead figures of the past being taken as the basis of the law I have to live under, I'll take them and the like of John Woolman over Jefferson, Madison and the other slavers, any day.
I WOULDN'T TELL IT except it's kind of funny. And because I've got no one to blame for it happening to me but myself.
The other day I did the last big chunk of my transplanting of seedlings I started this Spring knowing full well that I was bending the wrong way, sitting on a low stool, bent forward and twisting from side to side. I know better than to do that and didn't count myself as a hapless victim when, as I got up I had the unmistakable thought slight signs of sciatica. Did I watch out for that over the next couple of days? No.
So when I lay down to sleep last night, after another day of not being careful it was myself who I cursed when I felt the now severe agony of sciatica in my left buttocks and right down to my leg to my foot. I tried this and that position finally finding one that I didn't feel pain in so I finally fell asleep around midnight. Which may have been somewhat OK.
Being a hot day and sleeping in a room that gets hot as frickin' hell on hot days I left the fan on in my window to blow the finally cool and refreshing air in my window. Only about two in the morning a skunk who had obviously sprayed someone parked itself outside to hunt for grubs in the plants right outside my window, the stench of which woke me up and forced me to try to get up to turn off the fan and close the window only to repeat in reverse and in greater pain the actions I'd taken lying down - it's a lot harder to get up from that than it is to get down in that, you feel every bit of gravity you're working against to do it.
So I'm really set up to enjoy the 4th of July. It he hypocrisies surrounding the citation of the Declaration of Independence which the goddamned Roberts Court hadn't nullified a year and three days ago, making the soon to be Donald Trump II into an impune monarch of the kind that the First Continental Congress had rejected in that document, nullifying their declaration of Self Evident Truths, their claimed intentions of establishing a legitimate and just government in place of monarchy, the crime spree by Trump and the Republican-fascists - THE PARTY OF THE ENTIRELY PARTISAN AND FASCI-MONARCHIST SIX FASCIST MAJORITY ON THE ROBERTS COURT - are destroying all of the progress won against the Constitution to bring it only part way to what we were promised in the Declaration . . . . if that weren't enough, now thanks to the stupid prescription of how to fittingly celebrate the adoption of that document by John Adams, I'll have a night of listening to idiots setting off fireworks, thanks to goddamned Republicans in New Hampshire And Maine, joined by some idiot libertarian-liberal Democrats, all night tonight.
I detest the 4th of July. And it's not just the fireworks and the death and maiming and fires they cause, it's that the very engine of American nationalist patri-eroticism is bringing us into the fasci-monarchy that the worst of the framers such as the real instead of the Broadway-Disney Hamilton set us up for in the worst aspects of the Constitution.
Well, if the skunk hadn't come along, it wouldn't have been nearly as funny. And all the poor creature wanted to do was find something to eat. Americans, we did the rest of it to ourselves.
I especially like the Black farmer pointing out that Black farmers aren't freaking out because due to the racism of the federal agencies who have been giving out rancher and farmer welfare to white farmers for more than a century, they already know how to do without what the racist white Trump farmers can't do without and which their man-god Trump has taken away from them. I also like the guy who is pointing out how in a racist Louisiana Trump voting town with 91% white population they're expecting Black People to pick blueberries for 9-11 hours from May to July in Louisiana sun for 11 dollars an hour.
Racists, our indigenous fascist burden of white supremacists, are the most pampered and costly minority group in this country and they have been since the First Continental Congress and even more so in the Constitutional Convention and every Congress that has happened since then. In electing Trump and the racist, fascist, crooked 119th Congress that is handing the country over to the billionaires, lock stock and barrel, they may well have destroyed the country. No pity for them, none at all, I don't mind saying I enjoy hearing their pain because they have so richly earned that.
The Western media is entirely OK with tens of thousands of Brown Skinned People being murdered, Children, Babies, Elderly People, Women, Noncombatants, etc. but they're going nuts over a musician saying "Death to the IDF, the very army carrying out the genocide, bragging about it, glorying in it, recording it life and posting it immediately AND THE GODDAMNED AMERICAN FREE PRESS IS WORKED UP OVER WORDS INSTEAD OF MURDERED BODIES. They are entirely like the media that covered up for the Nazis in the 1930s, the American Bund, the other pro-Nazis.
THIS DISCUSSION WITH MEHDI HASAN is a landmark in pushing the far more democratic method of voting, one in which you have a far better chance of getting your first or second choice instead of the old fashioned one where you have a far higher chance of getting your dead last choice. Maine adopted ranked-choice as a result of a popular referendum - the politicians in office, already, by and large didn't want it, especially those high up in leadership- ESPECIALLY SQUARED THE REPUBLICANS. It came after we had one of the worst governors in the country elected by 38% of the voters due to our idiotic ease of getting guaranteed losers such as attract idiot play-lefties and Green Party style Republican-fascist spoilers on the ballot which always turns out to benefit the Republicans and now Republican-fascists.
Alas, our idiotic state constitution has thwarted attempts to extend ranked-choice to the Maine governors' election, which left us vulnerable to the combination of Republican-fascist, Green Party and other spoilers giving us another Le Page or McKernan (generally agreed to have been the worst one we had before Le Page). Though I'll point out that, as in the recent New York City Democratic Mayors nomination process, winner takes all has given us some really bad Democratic candidates and some less than great Democratic governors - we haven't had a really good one of those since Ken Curtis in the 1970s, though Janet Mills has been better than average.
The media has generally presented ranked choice voting, in which you designate your first choice, your second choice and your third choice - or leaving out your dead last choice from the ballot - as if American voters were too stupid to understand it. It's no more difficult than choosing a flavor of ice cream or pizza toppings, though the media pretends it's terribly complicated. I caught one of the cabloid pudits doing that over the NYC mayors election. They like Republicans getting into office with a minority of the voters, they want garbage like Green Party spoilers putting them in office.
As Brad Landers points out, ranked choice can bring a new dimension to American political races in which not only the voters but the candidates, themselves, can work so that THEIR second choice has a chance to beat out their dead last choice. He and Hasan point out that if the progressives in New York City had done the kind of cross-endorsement that Landers and Memdhani did, the criminal Eric Adams wouldn't have won. If Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had done that, we may have had one of them as president instead of Joe Biden - though, other than his fatal support of Israel's genocide, Biden was a great president.
I think we need to tell The People the benefits of rank-choice voting everywhere, to break through the fear campaign that's waged by the media - and some of that is alleged comedy, COLBERT. Calling it getting your second choice instead of your last choice - use Trump as an example as well as garbage like Paul LePage and Eric Adams.
USUALLY WHEN I POST A VIDEO, it's because I think it's good or useful to watch. Today I'm going to post a short video I feel the opposite about because while purporting to define "Zionism" so as to improve the discussion around the crimes and actions of the Israeli government, it rigs the definition to equate anti-Zionists with antisemites - which has been an effort by the most dishonest and crooked of Zionists and those in their hire though probably not really caring about the issue during my entire lifetime. That lie is, in fact, crumbling, ironically due to the situation created by the most overt attempt to do that, the crooked and dishonest definition of "antisemitism" cooked up by the IHRA which governments have either willingly adopted as a definition or which they have been blackmailed into making a basis of laws to suppress the criticism and even reporting of the truth about what the Israeli-fascist government does in its genocide and apartheid against those they exclude from real citizenship so they can dispossess them, remove them, harry them out of Israel or, when it's convenient to them, kill them. I have posted my slightly edited response to it below.
No, it's not especially helpful because a lot of People who are not bigots and not uninformed oppose Zionism because Zionism - as it really is since the Zionists settled on the colonization of Palestine (and it was a term used by Zionists, themselves) - it is an inherently racist, dishonest ideology that sought to impose a "Jewish" state on an area in which Palestinians were already living - who were a mix of mostly Muslims but also Jews and Christians - the definition of that state excluding those who weren't Jewish. You want to limit the current use of the word to those who are anti-Jewish bigots who are either dishonest or ignorant when most of those I hear are not bigots or dishonest or ignorant and they know exactly what they mean, that they oppose such an ethno-nationalist state which inevitably turns into apartheid, discrimination and the violent expulsion of non-Jewish Palestinians as, in fact, every government that the state of Israel has had has practiced to one degree or another. It is not a fact that "Jews" control the media, it is a fact that the intimidation of Zionists has a control of the majority of the media in the United States, for example, and, as you tangentially mention, a lot of those are what is misnamed "Christian Zionists," misnamed not for their Zionism but for the fact that their "Christianity" is one that has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc. You also leave out the fact, and it is a fact, that a large percentage of both "Christian" and "Jewish" Zionists, are, in fact antisemites. The current ambassador from the United States, Mike Huckabee, is an antisemite whose pseudo-Christianity believes that the state of Israel will bring on the "end-times" when he believes Jesus will come back and that all Jews who don't convert to Christianity will be obliterated something he shares with many of the TV preacher-Zionists and many a true believer in such pseudo-Christian cults. You also don't mention that many of the Zionists from the start were as vicious in their stereotyping of Jews and as slanderous as the worst of gentile antisemites, that includes not only pre-state Zionists like Herzl and Jabotinsky, it included David Ben Gurion, the first PM of Israel.
And many anti-Zionists are, as you do mention, tangentially, Jews, many of them very credible Rabbis and many egalitarian-democratic though secular Jews, as well. Also many Christian anti-Zionists, such as myself, are opposed to all ethno-states. I'm as opposed to France or Spain being an ethno-state, suppressing language and cultural minorities, or my own country which has been a white-supremacist ethno-state for its entire existence, many of those states being for People of Color what is, in truth, a fascist state. Many of those states controlled by the pseudo-Christian, often antisemites mentioned above.
So, no, your short video doesn't help, it doesn't clarify a complex situation that defies simple definitions.
Update: No. Absolutely not. No. I absolutely reject the related dishonesty that only Jews are allowed to discuss this anymore than you would have had to be a South African to discuss South African Apartheid, an American to discuss America's apartheid and indigenous form of fascism which has plagued us and which is still embedded in our Constitution, white supremacy and every single related form of anti-egalitarian and so anti-democratic and IMMORAL ideology that has ever existed anywhere. That phony "rule" along with such rules as you may not compare the crimes of genocide against any other People anywhere by calling attention to the similarity of it with the to the Nazi's genocide against Jews is clearly in aid to the racist ideology that my criticism caused you to invoke that phony, dishonest "rule" against.
Anyone who says I don't have a right to say what I said is welcomed to fuck off.
